Restaurant Sushiro's florid Facebook posts started as a joke thanks to game of reverse Pictionary

PHOTO: Facebook/Sushiro Singapore

SINGAPORE - Chopped tuna by any other name would still be chopped tuna. Except when Japanese restaurant Sushiro is describing it on its Facebook page.

Then a bowl of Japanese rice topped with salmon and salmon roe becomes: "Commonplace chirashi frolics and revels withal due respect in finding the happiness in its simplest and purest form illustrates notably the salt of the earth praiseworthy salmon and caviar composition is evermore the kosher desideratum to the epicurean soul."

This bombastic phrasing has helped Sushiro's posts go viral. That description, posted on Aug 8, has received more than 600 reactions and shares. Many netizens were stumped by the language. And there are more such posts on its Facebook page.

Sushiro told The Straits Times on Tuesday (Aug 14) that the posts were written by one of its chefs, who preferred to remain anonymous, and had started as an in-house joke.

The Sushiro staff were playing reverse Pictionary as a team-building game, when the idea to use tricky vocabulary to describe the dishes came up.

Members of the team had to take turns describing a dish, while making it difficult for the opposing team to guess what it was.

A Sushiro spokesman said: "One of the kitchen chefs started throwing out these literary phrases and it became a rolling joke that he should do an Instagram takeover for his 'thought-provoking' vocabulary.

"We were trying to give a different outlook on food descriptions and he had an innovative take on it."

The chef has been posting captions on the company's Instagram account and Facebook page since March.

Not everyone is taken by the flowery descriptions. Some netizens criticised Sushiro for mauling the English language.

Facebook user Riona Fae said: "Okay, the least you could have done was to get the grammar in this horrible run-on sentence right before you began word-vomiting the most unnecessarily, disgustingly flowery prose I've ever seen all over this paragraph in a cheap attempt to look like someone who actually passed O-level English."